Your eyes do not deceive you! It’s a new (temporary) club!
This year of 2021 has a lot of anniversaries and special occasions, many of which will be celebrated by the other book clubs throughout the rest of the year. One such anniversary is the release of the series 52, a weekly maxi-series that started on this day, May 10th back in 2006.
So to celebrate its 15th anniversary, this Book Club will starting every Monday, read through 1 issue of this book every week until its conclusion!
So, let’s start this! A synopsis and link is down below:
The DCU spent a year without Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman—a year in which the fate of the world hung in the balance! Now Grant Morrison, Geoff Johns, Greg Rucka and Mark Waid deliver the thrilling tale of the heroes who protected the planet in their absence in this best-selling series.
So let’s read this issue and talk about it! Is this your first time reading this series? Did you read it as it came out? How does it fare now? Tell us all the things!
I read the entirety of 52 as it came out and loved it. It was one of my favorite new titles in 2006 (along with Justice League of America, which also celebrates its 15th anniversary this year), and was always a fun read, week after week.
Looking forward to a re-read of the whole 52 shebang!
puts on his “In for the long haul” baseball cap
BTW, will the tie-in World War III mini-series be covered as time goes on? It came out as the main series was chugging along in the Spring of '07.
Serious question, was Countdown worth the read? I picked up each issue as they came out for 52 and loved this series.
I even have the 52 novelization by Greg Cox!!! I still need to read it but fully plan on doing so after I finish this Black Canary book that I have been dragging my feet on.
(picture coming soon when I am more awake)
I don’t care what anyone says, I liked the potatoes out of Countdown as it came out.
I haven’t read it since it concluded in 2008, but I bet I’d still like it, as I heartily enjoyed all of DC’s weekly books during that era.
SN: Trinity might be coming along in the JLBC at some point. Not the whole year-long shebang, but at least several issues (especially those with Jim Lee covers).
@D4RK5TARZ Your enjoyment of Countdown may also depend on how big of a Paul Dini fan you are, as he was heavily involved in the series.
Being a mark for Dini, I was thrilled to see him involved in such a large scale comic story, and that likely contributed to a good portion of my enjoyment of the title.
Yeah, he’s in a really rough state at the beginning of this story. It’s funny, of all the subplots in this series, his is the one I kind of remember the least, so I’m curious to see where he goes here.
I actually have a copy of this issue signed by the editor for the circus known as weekly 52, Stephen Wacker, who says he almost lost his mind doing this for a full year every single week, making sure everyone involved had their work in on time. The artists might have been more of a problem than the writers I’m thinking.
Marvel was so impressed they hired him to do the same thing for Spider-Man I guess the next year.
I will admit with all the years and crises that have happened since I don’t fully remember how we got to this point. I remember reading a lot of Checkmate and Batman’s O.M.A.C.s attacking, and I realize the cover indicates Batman, Wonder Woman and Superman are going to stop doing missions for a while. Guess I’ll need to Wikipedia this to figure out the background again.
I’m going to have to go look up at all this stuff, I’m not sure why is Superman’s nose would be bleeding.
I was so jazzed with the experience of walking into the comic book store every week knowing there be something waiting for me, I went ahead and picked up all the Wednesday Comics when they came out two years later… on fancy newsprint paper like USA Today quality paper no less.
Guess what strip Dan Didio wrote in the Wednesday comics weekly that summer…
Yeah, I imagine the art was the hardest part of making this work – which is probably why Keith Giffen was so instrumental in doing his breakdowns, giving artists something to use to quickly get the story done.
I’ll say that honestly I really didn’t like Wacker’s tenure on Spider-Man (I really didn’t like any Spidey story Marvel was publishing until Chip Zdarsky started writing him), but he does have a talent at getting some amazing artists to work with him.
I’ll be honest – I had the thought going in to start with a “Week Zero” with maybe the events of Infinite Crisis, but other stuff in life was going on and it sort of crept up on me.
He should – he’s been showing up in some books lately, and he’s got that Blue and Gold mini-series by Dan Jurgens coming up.
As I recall Supes basically flew Superboy Prime into a red sun to depower him, and in the process he depowered himself, so he basically spent the year as Clark Kent, regular journalist.
I LOVED those stories! I’m just bummed they’re out of print and aren’t available in digital, outside of the Batman strip (sorta).
Okay, I had to go and hunt down every one of these posts, but let’s see if I can catch up.
I appreciate that this series begins by asking the question, “When do things go back to normal?” Of course, the DC editors had cheated by using the One Year Later gimmick to skip all the way to the return of “normal,” but the appeal of 52 from the start was seeing everyone trying to put their lives back together (in real time!) after a traumatic event.
I agree, this is definitely one of the more interesting parts of this series to me so far, more the smaller character beats of these heroes dealing with the fallout that’s usually just swept under the carpet in the last pages of the last issue.
